One-Shot Wednesday
On Wednesdays, guess the Chicago-based movie or television show from one screenshot.
Space Jam
In Space Jam (1996), Chicago Bulls basketball legend Michael Jordan teams up with the Looney Tunes characters to win a basketball game against aliens. The film combines live-action and animation, and it culminates in a victory with Jordan’s iconic slam dunk.
To achieve the live-action/animated special effects in 1995-96, artists took their original drawings and paintings (from paper) and scanned them into a computer. After that, the animators “touched them up, and then separated elements to give [audiences] various depths of field.” Read more about the painstaking process in Part 2 of Space Jam’s oral history.
Matt Johnson, one of Space Jam’s digital artists, recalls one particularly difficult shot that includes the Chicago skyline:
“There’s a shot where we start with Michael Jordan in a press conference and it goes up through a CG roof and then you see the Chicago panoramic skyline, past a miniature, and you go up and then it carries onto this big sequence as you travel past the moon, and then you’re into the toon CG world.”
Johnson continues. For the shot,
“I turned [the camera] on its side and I think I got a couple of people including myself just to stand against a white wall and kind of wave or make movements and things like that, and I just stuck us in the window. So if you look very carefully there are little people waving in the windows of the Chicago skyline, and that’s me and a couple of other people from the office.”
Watch the full sequence below, where you’ll find the above medium shot of Michael Jordan at the press conference.
Welcome to One-Shot Wednesday!
Think you’re a Chicago screen buff?
On Wednesdays, we post one still from a movie or TV show filmed or set in the Windy City. Your mission? Guess the title!
You've already seen this week’s image above. If you're feeling nostalgic, explore the full archive of past challenges to keep the fun rolling.